Finding Your Purpose
Swagger Factor
Swagger is your essence, your individual vibrations that emanate from your smile. It’s your natural unforced personality. I recently encountered a classmate in the business school at UNC-Chapel Hill. It was a learning experience to hear him describe contracts that he would at times foul up and yet continue to get business from the clients. It is important to note that he was a white male and this may not have been possible for marginalized groups.
His confidence and security in describing his mistakes showed me that he had a personality that has been crafted and molded to be influential and persuasive while authentically him-self. Sometimes the talent is the confidence, the unyielding faith that you will be successful. The innate ability to envision a sight that no one has witnessed before can result in a positive influence on the community. When you approach your vision with this type of confidence and swagger combined with the ability to actually do it well, you begin to bend reality around your vision.
Bending Reality
Have you ever seen a water bug skimming along a pond and creating waves that bend around the direction in which the water bug is scampering? Like a skipped rock, the ripples created in the water by the positive movement resemble the ripples you create in reality through your positive actions. Your business is a new reality for you and others, and its presence creates ripples
in the universe, which, if used correctly can attract partners, and clients to your mission. I use this analogy of a water bug because the bug is essentially taking a leap of faith and walking on water. Growing up my father
would describe a job as a lily pad and the employee as a frog. He would say “it’s easy to jump from one lily pad2 to another[meaning one job to another job] but it is really hard to jump on a lily pad out of the water [meaning getting a job without having one, which depicted my job search on the unemployment line].
In a way, this challenge of jumping out of the water wasn’t real to me. By learning how to step out on faith and walk on the water, I created a new reality. This is what you are doing as you start your freelance business; you are creating waves in reality by learning how to walk by faith and not by sight
Learn Balance-Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness
My greatest strength in business was that I was a people pleaser. I prided myself in customer service and making every client feel special, appreciated, and unique. This also became my greatest weakness because when a potential client said ‘No’ to what my company was offering, the feeling of rejection would be so heavy it would paralyze me and I would run over in my head a million times what I did wrong and how I could have approached this potential client differently. Though it is good to regularly evaluate your service offerings and pitch, it is counter-productive to overthink it. Some people will never become your client regardless of how polished and attractive the offering, and it is important to learn quickly how to move on from a “No” to the next opportunity. Even when you receive several “No’s” in a row, keep asking and stay in the game. My greatest weakness became ‘paralysis by analysis’. I would sit and re-think my rejection instead of moving on to the next opportunity. It took some time to better understand my personality and nature in business. Then, I had to retrain myself on how to respond to this weakness while maximize it as a strength.
Get Your Paper
The world, in which we live, though increasingly digitized, is rooted in the concept of paper and documentation. When we are born, we are assigned a sheet of paper, which proves and documents our birth. The same happens when we die, get married, get a job, or start a new business. Money is complex and coded paper that is increasingly hard to counterfeit. A pop culture saying is “money makes the world go round”, but I believe paper makes the world go round. Every major faith in the world has a book or bound set of papers that articulate the concepts of their belief. In the Christian faith, it is the Bible. The Bible is described as the Word. Jesus is also described in the Bible as the Word. The Bible is described as a sword so sharp it can cut to the bone. Imagine that a book of paper can cut to the bone!
It is important to understand the value of paper in our world and how it allows you to enter doors once closed to opportunity. A high school diploma is a piece of paper signed by officials of the school. A college degree is simply a piece of paper signed by the chairman of the board of trustees, the chancellor, and other school officials. All that hard work and years put into obtaining a degree and all you get is a piece of paper. However, this piece of paper also opens doors of opportunity for one’s career. The process of obtaining the degree shapes the way you think and expands your network. As you grow your business, realize a higher education degree will help to legitimize you in this paper-led world so you can ‘get your paper’.
Organization, Record Keeping, and Taxes
In business, ‘getting your paper right’ also means filing the correct required documentation to allow your business to operate legally. This means getting a business license (where required), appropriate documentation, and maintaining internal revenue tax filings and requirements. You can’t get paper until these papers are in order and properly prepared. In many cases, this may require you to hire a tax professional, use tax software, or partner with an accountant to regularly review your quarterly taxable revenue. If these papers are not in order, you can find yourself paying a fine or even serving jail time. It is a serious matter because our world operates by paper. So remember first things first: get your paper right!
Study to Show Thyself Approved
Once you have decided on the business that fits you best and uses your unique gifts to create innovative products or services that help people, set your mind on becoming the best at what you do. This active research and learning epitomizes the phrase ‘get yo paper right’. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to a group of students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on October 26, 1967. King said:
“Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great essayist, said in a lecture in 1871, ‘If a man can write a better book or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door”....King elaborated, “If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well” (King 1967).
Becoming the best at what you do takes time and requires you to teach yourself how to become better at what you do. The objective is to learn how to learn.
This required me to learn more about my industry and the challenges my clients face in order to provide offerings that helped solve problems. It also required that I regularly read news articles, keep up on current events, and find relevant research on my industry so that I could be the most knowledgeable consultant for my clients.
Flip the Mail Box
During my first days of business, while I was still struggling for answers and learning how businesses operate, I paid close attention to every business I invested in through bills, services, and consumer goods. My first year in business, I only made $11,000. If another business could make me buy a product with my small income, then they must be doing something right. I started noticing that my mailbox trips were becoming more and more arduous with the fear of mounting ‘papers’ - bill after bill, past due notice after past due notice. A thought came to my mind ‘Flip the Mailbox.’
Instead of looking in the mailbox to find bills, figure out a way to get checks to come to the mailbox while you bill your clients. This concept was simple to say but harder to do. Though it started with thinking about a new line of ideas on how my company could reduce cost to clients by splitting payments into monthly billings and extending one-time service offerings into long-term partnerships.
Love Your Hood
I see service like the spirals in tree’s inner bark; its starts with family, then neighborhood, then nation, and then many nations. At Bethune-Cookman University, I graduated with a degree in Political Science. The Political Science Department’s motto is ‘Think globally; act locally.” This piece of paper I acquired in that degree came with a passion to help all people achieve first class citizenship.
Service to humanity starts at home with how effective I am serving my family and meeting their needs. Though this is never a process one can master, it is important to keep family as a priority in everything I do. Second to family is my neighborhood and making a positive impact in the lives of those who live and work near me. It is not good enough for me to think of my business as a tool for me to buy as many goods as I want but a tool for community transformation. I want to leave a positive mark on every community in which I have lived. I want to “love my hood”. I do this by providing business services that are at an affordable rate and create opportunities for my clients to grow.
My thesis from the Master’s in Public Administration program at UNC-Chapel Hill was entitled “Critical Factors of Economic Boycotts”. My research found that the Montgomery Bus Boycott, that lasted 381 days, achieved bus desegregation not solely by the moral conviction of white southerners. A major factor in this social justice victory was the subtraction of ten cents per day per person from every boycott member who previously invested in the inequitable bus system. It was the organized removal of capital that utilized capitalism to secure social justice. Hence, their collective actions proved that capitalism could also be used as a tool for social justice (Williams, 1989).
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